Developer Frans Pop, author of debtree, posted an article showing the evolution in size of the GNOME desktop environment in recent Debian releases. The picture he paints isn't particularly pretty: the default GNOME install has increased drastically in size over the years.

You can call it a swindle all you want, but in the end it is not what you believe about the software that counts. Most company managers are satisfied with "good enough" and are willing to pay more to get it done quicker. Most of them are not computer geeks, they do not care about disk cycles and CPU execution times (a few ms here and there makes no difference to them at all). You can rail against it all you want, but in the end you're still out the money they gave to someone else because you wouldn't do it in the way or the timeframe they wanted. If you're writing software for someone else, your beliefs are irrelevant. Your objective is to satisfy them, not yourself. If you don't get it done fast enough, your beliefs aren't going to get them to give you more time.

You can call it a swindle all you want, but in the end it is not what you believe about the software that counts. Most company managers are satisfied with "good enough" and are willing to pay more to get it done quicker. Most of them are not computer geeks, they do not care about disk cycles and CPU execution times (a few ms here and there makes no difference to them at all). You can rail against it all you want, but in the end you're still out the money they gave to someone else because you wouldn't do it in the way or the timeframe they wanted. If you're writing software for someone else, your beliefs are irrelevant. Your objective is to satisfy them, not yourself. If you don't get it done fast enough, your beliefs aren't going to get them to give you more time.

What you say is true, but it doesn't have to be that way.

If everyone starts to think that nothing can be done about it and that one has to bow to the system, then it won't change.